Productive Doubts

A Review by Ian Stephen

‘Imagined Spaces’, edited by Gail Low and Kirsty Gunn, The Voyage Out Press, £14.99

One time at Uni in Aberdeen, my tutor George Watson, a poet himself as well as a critic, explained why my essay on ‘The Ancient Mariner’ wasn’t that great. ‘It would make a good lecture,’ he said. And then I remembered that the times the writing seemed worthwhile was when it was getting out of control. Words were tangled with developing thoughts in a way that turned out to be productive. Before you even open it, this book of developing conversations gives a sense of the freedom to explore. The texture and typography remind me, somehow, of the folios and one-off publications which used to come regularly from Alec Finlay’s Morning Star Publications. You might dip into a white envelope to unfold a map but it would most probably guide you to an artist’s imagined land. I’m thinking also of Gary Snyder’s poetry and George Oppen’s and that of Olaf Hauge, mainly through Robin Fulton’s translations. There is a sense that the form has been discovered rather than prescribed in advance.
The front cover of ‘Imagined Spaces’ has an embossed rectangle which suggests sanctuary. The reverse lists the 22 contributors, not including editors Gail Low and Kirsty Gunn. Their introduction is itself a collaborative essay, with no need to credit the voices as they engage in conversation. And there is also a quote on the back cover:
‘A book of essays is like a series of conversations in your own room.’
The book contains another six examples of collaborative essay or recorded exchanges between individuals. For example, Scots of Nigerian and Pakistani background, Tomiwa Foluronzo and Hamzah Hussain, exchange meditations on meanings of something sometimes called ‘hame’. The discussions cross artforms too – Lorens Holm opens the considered chat with visual artist Paul Noble by sharing recent photographs of residential parts of Wuhan. These in turn prompt an exchange of descriptions and images of the work of Patrick Geddes. As audience we are included in the only slightly edited spinning of ideas. All plans have to be provisional. Kenny Taylor in the Black Isle and Duncan Maclean on Orkney swap considerations on what the hell ‘north’ might be from their relative positions and from the diverse backgrounds composed of their own trades and concerns.
Whitney MacVeigh shares both her own explorations with inks on paper and the language she has arranged to face these. Again there is the suggestion that excursions into essay suit chancers, but diligent ones intent on exploring the range of their medium:
 ‘Doubt, uncertainty are passions for the artist, only understood by those in communion             with their materials.’
Appropriately for a book born in Dundee, Susan Nickalls draws you into the shapes of the ideas contained in the new V and A building. There is a thorough describing of buildings by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, to give an international context, but also the surprising correspondence of aesthetic affinity with the architect’s words on Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Philip Lopate, editor of multi-volume collections of American essays of different periods has read more of this form (or non-form) than most. I’m guessing there’s a serious intent in his playful opening:
‘…I invite you to find this particular article disappointing from the get-go.’
There has to be something that takes you along for the hurl and spin. Lopate’s provocation is one way. Meaghan Delahunt is a novelist unable to find a publisher for her most recent novel and, in another impasse, waiting for the operation which will make mobility less painful again. Her meditation (like that of George Saunders in his demanding novel) entices you to consider the Bardo. It could be just too heavy going but it’s not. After describing the preserved shark presented by Damien Hirst as ‘The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living’, she comments that the title is the best part of the work but even that could do with an edit. She turns from the mad commercialism which can think it OK just to slay another tiger-shark, for the sale of the physical form of the work, to make a contrast with installations in salt by Motoi Yamamoto. These are compared with the drawings in sand by Tibetan monks, in that the material is returned unharmed to its own place in the world.
There’s juxtapositions and startling choices, challenging invitations, throughout this book which you will want to set aside and then return to. Take the detailed inventory of observations of a military transit flight described by Dai John. You’re intrigued and also sucked in to the jargon and the texture of report-writing. Then comes the jump. Not with parachute but in a mind moving from darkness to daylight. This is something beyond any listing of detail, no matter how diligent:
‘…the geography conspires to rearrange itself to coincide with the emergence of first light         and objects – trees, buildings, whatever – change their relationship with you and with each     other’
Often such carefully made publications have been difficult to get hold of. ‘The Voyage Out’ press have linked with Saraband publishers for distribution. I wanted to pass this handsome book to a friend but I knew I’d want to return, soon, to find more of what I’ve missed so I just got on the internet to arrange for another copy, to be sent direct. That proved to be no bother. I can now look forward to conversations sparked off, in turn – a chain reaction.

‘The Other Side of Stone’, Linda Cracknell, Taproot Press    (£14.99 direct from taprootpress.co.uk)

In our times a novel can pretty much do what the hell it likes. To counterbalance that, maybe now most publishers will feel they have to play a safer game, even though the strong voice of ‘Milkman’ won the Booker and Roddy Doyle’s latest, ‘Love’, returns to modernism and dares to imitate the repetitions and false-starts of two pissed old mates talking round what might need to be said. Linda Cracknell has published both short story collections and a novel. It may be telling that she also is vastly experienced in adapting works for radio. You might expect such a writer to have a fair grip of narrative. You’d be right but that helps her take some risks with chronology. Some of the chapters in this second publication from Taproot Press have been published as individual stories and the author describes the work as starting with the intention of writing a novel.
The narrative structure linking the stories is founded on a building. An itinerant mason carves a symbol in an unseen face of the date-stone. There is a flow of stories which will take us from 1831 to the revelation of that mark. As a reader you know that has got to happen. The risk of such a structural device is predictability, but this refined expression of  the writer’s craft avoids that. After the initial monologue of the mason, the story goes back and forth between two periods – the pre-First World War days of agitation for worker’s rights and women’s rights in particular and the turn from the 20th to the 21st century.
OK - the next risk, knowingly taken, is that such a pattern could get messy. Except that this is a weaving mill, and the colours and the patterns of the cloth, changing with the times, are a linking motif through the book. This becomes most prominent in the story of the last tweed, completed by a thrawn Yorkshireman doing a one-man lockdown:
‘He filled the pirn of pale blue yarn for a crossway that made up thirty-eight parts of the             hundred, and replaced it in the shuttle. He thought of the oval recess inside as a womb, a strangely tender place within the grease-smoothed metal-tipped wooden bullet.’
There’s never any confusion, partly because the social and political background of each period is bold and partly because there are signatures which differentiate the times. Earlier days are re-made in a first person voice, later ones are told in the third person but holding very close to the thoughts of a main character.
The voice itself could have been an issue, in dialogue and in close narration, near flow of consciousness, in places. In the same way as Malachy Tallack avoided the issue of imitating the more dense Shetlandic voice in ‘The Valley at the Centre of the World’, Linda Cracknell draws characters who would not speak in the most pronounced Perthshire voice. The mason is a travelling artisan and the master weaver hails from Huddersfield. The thwarted suffragette moves in the political language of her day. There is more continuity in her story than that of any other single character, as we weave in and out, through time. We are engaged by the forceful personality of that woman as her husband is drawn into dependence on the reasonably benevolent mill-owners:
‘Principles aren’t to brandish about in a wee family firm.’
A single character (the thrawn George) does enter more than one section of the later period, but there are also individual strands which are not followed. A returning son meets a man on the train who shows a reminder that Perthshire lives can still be bereaved by actions in other lands. An ambitious architect is not very good at listening to the advice of a sister who has a much stronger grasp of structure than he has.
For this reader, the refusal to tidy everything up by linking more of the characters is a strength. I recently re-read ‘Winnesburg Ohio’ by Sherwood Anderson and this came to mind. Graham Roberts, a lecturer who did much to foster creative writing at Aberdeen University steered me to the seminal work of linked short-stories. There are shared characters and, like ‘The Other Side of Stone’ there is the need of one person to go out from ‘home’ to find a place in the world.
Perhaps Linda Cracknell’s book could well be termed a novel but I don’t think that matters. What does count is the skill in the telling of the tales, whether they obviously interlock or no. So does the careful presentation and so does the venturing spirit of this publisher. Like Stefan Tobler’s & Other Stories, a subscription scheme has been developed to enable risks to be taken. I’m grateful that both publications from Taproot Press to date have seen the light of day.